Sarah Murphy

Bio

Artist Statement

My work explores the glitch as a site of potential emerging from the misuse of a medium. Once understood as an unwanted mechanical failure, the glitch has evolved into a recognised artistic process and aesthetic, challenging the dominance of digital precision and opening space for alternative possibilities of meaning and expression. 

In an attempt to materialise the immaterial digital error, my work reveals the potential in bending a medium outside its expected function, inducing and appreciating error in digital and physical domains. This is achieved in my display of obsolete media, discarded and forgotten between the rapid development of technology. The viewer is forced to see technology from a shifted perspective, where its only remaining function is to error. 

I position painting not only as a medium, but as the subject itself. Through grid stencilling and pixelated forms, the fluid nature of paint becomes restricted into a mechanical order. Within this imposed control, “glitches” arise beyond the digital domain into physicality. These moments of malfunction become generative, surfacing a tension between control and breakdown, intention and accident 

My visual language reflects a sense of disembodiment shaped by digital culture, where identity is fragmented through constant mediated interactions. My installation ultimately transforms machines, handmade works, and the public into malfunctioning systems. The interactive projection uses an intricate coded software paired with an unconventional console sensor, where the viewer must confront their destabilised, disintegrating image and become immersed into my space.